Andy Clerkson: “It’s a crime that sportsbooks generally look the same as they did 10 years ago.”

The Unit has announced the appointment of Andy Clerkson as its new chairman, marking a strategic step in the company’s rapid global expansion. Clerkson, a seasoned executive with leadership experience at SportCaller and Low6, is stepping into a more hands-on role to guide The Unit through scaling sustainably across new and emerging markets.

In this exclusive interview, he discusses the responsibilities that come with being Chair, the company’s ambitious plans for 2025, and how The Unit is positioning itself in competitive sectors like social casinos, prediction markets, and regulated territories across Brazil, Africa, and beyond.

Q: Andy, you have transitioned from the role of Strategic Advisor at The Unit to a Chairman. How is your new role going to be different from what you have been doing at the company as of right now?

In the gaming industry, while you couldn’t throw a laminated exhibition pass without hitting a pair of passing strategic consultants, there aren’t so many of us Chair folk. To be Chair of a company ultimately entails accountability – and, with that, far greater responsibility.

I’ve been lucky enough to hold the role for a couple of well-established privately owned companies in SportCaller and Low6, so I’ve learned the ropes. In my job description, it says that I will help the excellent CEO, Paddy Casey, keep the company strategy on course, hold the senior leadership team to account as regards performance and, for a company in high growth mode, ensure that all guardrails are in place to scale sustainably. What that means is, I will be doing all I can to improve the company and add value to the team and the shareholders.

Q: The Unit has been keen to expand across international markets, and something more – it has been pushing hard to accomplish this. What are the main growth trajectories the company has set out to travel in 2025?

The Unit has a development team numbering over 100 staff, and has all the scaffolding set to continue to scale. So, we will tackle several new markets over the remainder of the year. The industry is chock-a-block with innovators in categories such as prediction markets, social casinos, DFS 2.0 and more; all looking to move fast. With sportsbooks and iCasino, we’ve witnessed an explosion into newly regulated territories like LatAm and Africa, so we are offering our services to new and established operators to help them grow quickly and on budget. The Unit’s specialist teams for sports, casino and social gaming will continue to facilitate a golden opportunity for any company looking to build new products and features to get ahead of their roadmap. 

Q: Brazil now offers some exciting opportunities for partners such as Sportingtech. What do you think The Unit’s core strengths are when it comes to helping the company differentiate in this highly competitive and fast-growing market?

Deep experience of how to design and build a modern sportsbook. The Unit’s senior team have been architecting and developing betting and casino platforms for more than a decade. The keys are understanding what ‘good’ looks like and how it should feel and respond to the customer, alongside knowing how to integrate with middleware and enterprise-level backends is not a commodity skill set. Partners such as Sportingtech are working with The Unit so that they can expand quickly without derailing their core development teams.

Q:  The company is pursuing growth in other emerging markets, such as Africa – what has been your specific area of interest in places where gambling is freshly legalized and only now gathering noticeable momentum?

When I sold Grand Parade to William Hill in 2016, we had a handful of over-saturated regulated markets to work in. Now, most destinations from Heathrow have an easily downloadable sportsbook or casino available on arrival. The markets are new, but the products are solving the same set of issues as before – namely, moving tremendous amounts of data at low latency, building wallets, highlighting and resulting promotions, integrating the respective territory’s primary payment gateways, and of course player protection, geo-location and fraud prevention.

Yes, we can do it with tokens instead of dollars, navigate or bet via voice instead of typing, personalise your content based on your search, preferred bet-types, banking and dietary history (well, maybe not dietary, but give it time!). The point is that The Unit’s highly specialised teams have done this before and will only keep getting better at it, as technology evolves. To be honest, it’s a crime that sportsbooks generally look the same as they did 10 years ago, and we have a boatload of amazing ideas on how to modernise the customer experience if partners want to innovate.

Q: Prediction markets and social casinos have proven to be an exciting new opportunity but one that has, nevertheless, come under a lot of regulatory scrutiny. How do you feel about these sectors?

My career has focused on innovation and entrepreneurship, so I am fully supportive of disruptors. I would wager that all of the household names we know in our industry started out by pushing hard at the boundaries.

As long as the activities are legal (and social casinos are legal in most US states, or there would not be a clamour from some to pass new laws to make them illegal), companies are paying their taxes and customers are protected, who are we to suppress one form of gaming versus another? The US market consolidated way too quickly for many consumers. Gaming attracts innovative, fast-moving bright people. If demand is high but opportunity is restricted, folks will find a way to play.